What's new

Smart Cascade v2 is a ground-up rebuild of our payment recovery infrastructure, replacing the rule-based PSP routing of v1 with a machine learning model trained on 18 months of retry outcome data. The result is a system that predicts the optimal PSP for each individual retry — rather than following a static priority list — increasing average recovery rates from 29% to 37%.

ML routing

The v2 routing model is a gradient-boosted classifier trained on 14M retry events. For each soft-declined transaction, it predicts the probability of successful recovery at each available PSP, given the decline reason code, card BIN, transaction amount, currency, merchant category, and time of day. The PSP with the highest predicted recovery probability is tried first.

Performance

Migration guide

Smart Cascade v2 is fully backwards compatible with v1 configuration. Existing customers will be migrated automatically during their next maintenance window. The only breaking change is the removal of the deprecated cascadeStrategy: 'round-robin' option, which is superseded by ML routing in all cases. No action is required unless you are using this option explicitly.